In the field of automated information processing, many applications have been developed to process information for useful purposes such as making a decision or evaluating a set of information based on one or more criteria. In many cases, the speed, accuracy, and reliability of these applications are often limited only by their abilities to reliably acquire information. As these applications are developed, they are typically designed to utilize, and/or rely upon, a specific set of information, and that information set is usually defined in accordance with the information that is reasonably accessible, or envisioned soon to be reasonably accessible, at the time when the application is devised and/or expected to be implemented. As the set of reasonably accessible information subsequently changes (e.g., new information becomes available or other information becomes unavailable), applications are often re-configured to function without the once-available information, or alternatively, to take advantage of the newly available information. In this way, applications that are not updated often become obsolete.
One example of an application that has been designed to process information is an application for determining the risk associated with a transaction. Many lenders have devised customized methods for determining risk associated with a transaction, and have developed applications to perform a transaction risk and/or creditworthiness assessment, i.e., to determine an applicant's credit score. As a practical matter, however, these applications are often limited to information that can be acquired reasonably quickly through reliable sources such as credit bureaus or the credit issuer's internal database. Although a lender may attempt to increase the accuracy and/or reliability of their credit-scoring model by accommodating additional information, such as recent transaction history, such attempts typically increase the time and cost required to complete a transaction risk and/or creditworthiness assessment. This is due to the increased time and effort required to acquire the additional information. Moreover, where additional information becomes available through a standard database provider, a lender must modify existing models to accommodate the additional information, resulting in increased cost.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method for facilitating the collection, storage and distribution of information, where a subscriber may easily configure the source of the information. Moreover, a need exists for a system and method for facilitating the collection, storage and distribution of information, where a subscriber may easily configure the definition of the information set.